Archive for
November 11th, 2012

Until last week, Democrats were 0-for-some-20-years in legislative and congressional races in western Riverside County, where the party’s candidates have often been little more than sacrificial lambs during campaign season.

RANCHO CUCAMONGA – The civil trial between Lanny Swerdlow, a medical marijuana advocate, and Paul Chabot, the founder and president of the Coalition for a Drug Free California, has been postponed until next year.

VICTORVILLE • The city of Victorville will receive $54 million from the designer of the failed Foxborough power plant, after the City Council approved a settlement offer during a closed session meeting Friday afternoon.

While the award won’t right all of the city’s financial woes, Mayor Ryan McEachron said “it’s a huge step in the right direction.”

Dan Morain

As they make their big plans, Democrats emboldened by their likely supermajority in the Legislature should study Betsy Butler and Michael Allen, two Democratic Assembly members who might not be coming back to Sacramento.

Dan Walters

Every poll of Californians’ attitudes toward the Legislature and other pieces of state government find deep disdain.

The mood is so sour, in fact, that even when the state’s politicians sponsor ballot measures, they seek to exploit it. One example: Ads for Gov. Jerry Brown’s tax measure, Proposition 30, assured voters – quite erroneously – that the money would be protected from “Sacramento politicians.”

Labor leaders and advocates for social services that have borne the brunt of recent state budget cuts are ripped over legislative leaders Darrell Steinberg and John Pérez’s out-the-gate pledge not to raise taxes, even though it looks like the Democrats will have supermajorities in both houses.

No one will talk on the record, but the feeling is, “We finally get the power, and you guys already give it up?”

The GOP’s share of voters in Riverside and San Bernardino counties has waned in the last decade. New political boundaries, drawn last year, have let pent-up Democratic power push to the surface.

By Phil Willon, Los Angeles Times November 10, 2012, 7:50 p.m.

Stirred by a decade of astronomical growth, economic heartache and the rising political influence of Latinos, the Inland Empire proved treacherous territory last week for a Republican Party that just a decade ago considered it the new GOP frontier.